As portable electronic devices become more compact, and the number of functions performed by a given device increase, it has become a significant challenge to design a user interface that allows users to easily interact with a multifunction device. This challenge is particular significant for handheld portable devices, which have much smaller screens than desktop or laptop computers. This situation is unfortunate because the user interface is the gateway through which users receive not only content but also responses to user actions or behaviors, including user attempts to access a device's features, tools, and functions. Some portable communication devices (e.g., mobile telephones, sometimes called mobile phones, cell phones, cellular telephones, and the like) have resorted to adding more pushbuttons, increasing the density of push buttons, overloading the functions of pushbuttons, or using complex menu systems to allow a user to access, store and manipulate data. These conventional user interfaces often result in complicated key sequences and menu hierarchies that must be memorized by the user.
Many conventional user interfaces, such as those that include physical pushbuttons, are also inflexible. This is unfortunate because it may prevent a user interface from being configured and/or adapted by either an application running on the portable device or by users. When coupled with the time consuming requirement to memorize multiple key sequences and menu hierarchies, and the difficulty in activating a desired pushbutton, such inflexibility is frustrating to most users.
Some portable, multifunction electronic devices provide a number of user applications, such as email, contacts, and calendar applications. Due to limitations in the user interfaces of such devices, it is often challenging for users to search for items of interest within these applications. For example, it can be inconvenient to enter text, including search terms, using a phone-style keypad. Also, the search functionality, if any, provided on many of these devices is generally not well-integrated with the respective user applications. For instance, some multifunction devices require a user to enter search terms on a search form that is separate from the application in which a search is to be conducted, which provides very little user context or interactivity for user search term selection and/or entry.
In addition, given that many portable multifunction devices (such as smart phones) have limited memory, these devices generally store locally only a subset of the information associated with some applications, such as email. In one example, a smart phone might store in its local memory a hundred or fewer emails associated with a user email account that includes thousands of emails stored on a server. A user might want to search all of these emails, or just the ones stored locally, but the ability to selectively search application data stored in different locations is not generally provided on smart phones or other multifunction electronic devices.
Accordingly, there is a need for portable multifunction devices with more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for providing search functionality. Such interfaces increase the effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction with portable multifunction devices.